Charlie Sorrel - page 74

Cult of Mac reader Christian Kos wrote to ask a couple of questions about shooting photos on a camera and importing them to the iPad using the camera connection kit. Specifically, he wanted to know

1. If there was any difference between slurping the pictures into the iPad using the SD card adapter in the camera connection kit, or connecting the camera direct via USB cable and
2. Whether the iPad actually gets the full-res pictures from the camera (in Christian’s case, a Fujifilm X100S (great choice BTW!)

Long answers below. Short answers: No and yes.

Danilo’s Command-C app is cool in many ways, but here’s just one thing it can do that’ll make you smile. With the app installed on both your Mac and your iPhone, you copy a URL on your Mac, click the menubar item for your iPhone, and your iPhone gets a notification. Whatever your copied is now on your iPhone’s clipboard, ready to paste, all without launching the iOS version of the app.

I tried to use Microsoft’s Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for a while, and it was indeed comfortable. However, the keys were squishy, and the unit itself made it seem like I had a black-painted Bantha-II cargo skiff on my desk.

The brand-new Matias Ergo Pro will fix both of those problems.

Prepare to have you socks blown off, and to know the exact GPS coordinates of the exact spot where those socks land. How? With Dr. Drang’s new Pythonista scripts which grabs your current location and writes it down in plain-text form. Better still, it does this using the Drafts app, so you can add location stamps to anything you like – journal entries, notes, or even pictures of your socks, over there in the corner of the room.

WriteRight is an iPad writing app that helps you with your, uh… words and stops you having to just use the same… mmm… words… Over and over. Instead of struggling to come up with alternative words to the word “word” all the time, you just ask WriteRight for “synonyms, antonyms and phraseology.”

Whew.

Did somebody send you a RAW photo file and you just don’t know what to do with it? Do you need to send your latest DSLR shoot from your Dropbox, only your friend/family member/client can’t be trusted with RAW files, and you only have your iPhone on hand?

Fear not, becasue the already awesome CloudConvert will now turn any RAW file into any regular image format, in the cloud, and save it back to the cloud for you.

iPhone users can now enjoy Spotify music for free, as long as you’re happy with shuffling through your tune. And even better news for iPad owners: the tablet version of the app treats you iPad as if it were a desktop machine, letting your listen to any music you like.

CES 2014 has been an orgy of “wearable” crap. Smartwatches, life-logging cameras, even 50-inch TVs can now be worn on your body. But if you’re looking for the future of personal tech, then look at the Speaker Band from Bem Wireless. If you thought teens were annoying now, with their mobile phones and tinny music, then wait until they get hold of this wrist-mounted speaker.

Arcam, the UK high-end audio company, has a little nugget to tempt audiophiles. It’s called the miniBlink, and it’s a “hi-def” Bluetooth audio adapter with a proper built-in DAC. What? Don’t fret. It just means you can beam Bluetooth audio to your stereo without it sounding crappy.

I love everything about my iPad Mini’s Smart Case but for one thing: I can’t use it with the BlueLounge MiniDock, a super handy little charging dock.

The iPort Charge Case and Stand won’t help there, but it will at least let me charge the iPad while it’s inside a case. It’ll even work in landscape orientation.

Amazon has made a huge update to the iOS Kindle app, bringing it mostly in line with the features on the hardware Kindle Paperwhite. Many of the new features concern the organization of books into collections, but there are also improvements to browsing notes, using X-Ray and even the reading screen.

Cult of Mac favorite Braven is showing off a wireless speaker at CES this year. It’s totally not what you’re expecting, though: The Vibe System is a range of hybrid Bluetooth/Wi-Fi speakers that can be used individually – hooked up to your iDevices – or in multiroom concert, Sonos-style. And being from Braven, it all runs away from mains power.

Braven’s new BRV-Bank is a ruggedized backup battery for your mobile devices, with some very neat/curious additions: It has Bluetooth, for one, and it can be remote controlled from your phone. WTF?

This is the Ladibird, and it might just be the answer to the question, “What the hell are the camera makers going to do now that we all have iPhones?” The Ladibird is a camera case that slides onto your iPhone 5/s and lets it take great portrait photos, complete with the blurred backgrounds characteristic of a fast lens.

Eye-Fi has launched Eye-Fi Labs, a place to find test versions of new software. The first thing that you might be interested in is the Eye-Fi Mobi Desktop Receiver for Mac, an app that will let you beam photos from your Eye-Fi Mobi card direct to your Mac.

If there’s one thing the fine citizens of the United States love in their cars it’s cup holders. God knows why a car needs like 20 places to stow a bucket of coffee or soda, but it does. Which means, ironically, that the average U.S car has an average of 16[1] cup holders empty at any one time.

Thankfully, the SpeeCup is here to fill up at least one of them, although given the amount of free cup-holder space available, it seems almost silly to combine a speaker, a Siri-enabled mic and a cup-shaped vessel into just one single gadget.

Canon’s new PowerShot N100 is also called the Story Camera. Why? Because it reads to you as you fall asleep at night? Because it puts speech bubbles in the mouths of your portrait subjects? Nope. It’s because it has a second camera on the back that snaps a photo of the photographer as they snap a picture of, well, anything.

MeteoEarth is a pretty rad weather app for the iPad. It’s purpose isn’t really to tell you whether to take an umbrella with your to the shops, but it can do that if you like. No, what MeteoEarth is really good at is showing you beautifully-animated views of the weather as it blows and scuds across the surface of the Earth. And now you can get it for the Mac.

Nikon has chosen the media shoutfest that is CES to announce the D3300 SLR, an update to the – that’s right – D3200. It comes with a new sensor, a faster processor, a different crappy kit lens and this year’s favorite new gimmick: no optical low-pass filter.

The FAVI pico+ projector is just another little battery-powered “beamer,” a DLP projector that can be kept in a pocket and used to throw photos and video from your iPhone or iPad up onto the wall. But this one has a neat extra – the built-in Wi-Fi radio ands AirPlay support, so the only cable you’ll need is the charger to keep the thing going.

The Fujifilm X100S aka The Best Camera I Ever Owned aka The Only Leica A Photographer Can Afford is now available in black. And unlike the overpriced special edition black X100, the black X100S is neither a special edition nor more expensive – it’s just a regular alternative colorway for the camera.

Have you ever watched somebody with long fingernails tap-tap-tapping at their iPhone or iPad screen? It’s painful. Either their overgrown keratin caps skitter over the screen in a chitinous clatter, or they have to approach the screen with the flat pads of their fingers, as if they were carefully giving the government a perfect image of their fingerprints.

But no longer. The most useful new product showcased at this year’s CES is Elektra Nails, a set of capacitive stick-on talons.

You know what would make all of those crazy-dangerous squirrel-suit action movies even better? A big, wide, cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio. And that’s just what you’ll get with the new Letus AnamorphX Adapter for the GoPro Hero.

Griffin has added a non-ugly, multitrack version of its StudioConnect music box. The sturdy-looking unit lets you record multiple instruments on your iPad (or Mac, if you’re still living in 2010), piping the results straight into the music software of your choice.

Ever felt the need to turn your Mac up to 11? Of course you have, and now, thanks to Griffin’s new Bluetooth PowerMate, you can do it wirelessly.